Saving General Boykin seemed like a strange sideshow last
October. After it was revealed that the deputy undersecretary
of defence for intelligence had been regularly appearing at evangelical
revivals preaching that the US was in a holy war as a "Christian
nation" battling "Satan", the furore was quickly
calmed.

Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, explained that Boykin
was exercising his rights as a citizen: "We're a free people."
President Bush declared that Boykin "doesn't reflect my
point of view or the point of view of this administration".
Bush's commission on public diplomacy had reported that in nine
Muslim countries, just 12% believed that "Americans respect
Arab/Islamic values". The Pentagon announced that its inspector
general would investigate Boykin, though he has yet to report.

Boykin was not removed or transferred. At that moment, he
was at the heart of a secret operation to "Gitmoize"
(Guantánamo is known in the US as Gitmo) the Abu Ghraib
prison. He had flown to Guantánamo, where he met Major
General Geoffrey Miller, in charge of Camp X-Ray. Boykin ordered
Miller to fly to Iraq and extend X-Ray methods to the prison
system there, on Rumsfeld's orders.

Boykin was recommended to his position by his record in the
elite Delta forces: he was a commander in the failed effort to
rescue US hostages in Iran, had tracked drug lord Pablo Escobar
in Colombia, had advised the gas attack on barricaded cultists
at Waco, Texas, and had lost 18 men in Somalia trying to capture
a warlord in the notorious Black Hawk Down fiasco of 1993.

Boykin told an evangelical gathering last year how this fostered
his spiritual crisis. "There is no God," he said. "If
there was a God, he would have been here to protect my soldiers."
But he was thunderstruck by the insight that his battle with
the warlord was between good and evil, between the true God and
the false one. "I knew that my God was bigger than his.
I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

Boykin was the action hero side of his boss, Stephen Cambone,
a conservative defence intellectual appointed to the new post
of undersecretary of intelligence. Cambone is universally despised
by the officer corps for his arrogant, abrasive and dictatorial
style and regarded as the personal symbol of Rumsfeldism. A former
senior Pentagon official told me of a conversation with a three-star
general, who remarked: "If we were being overrun by the
enemy and I had only one bullet left, I'd use it on Cambone."

Cambone set about cutting the CIA and the state department
out of the war on terror, but he had no knowledge of special
ops. For this the rarefied civilian relied on the gruff soldier
- a melding of "ignorance and recklessness", as a military
intelligence source told me.

Just before Boykin was put in charge of the hunt for Osama
bin Laden and then inserted into Iraqi prison reform, he was
a circuit rider for the religious right. He allied himself with
a small group called the Faith Force Multiplier that advocates
applying military principles to evangelism. Its manifesto - Warrior
Message - summons "warriors in this spiritual war for souls
of this nation and the world ... "

Boykin staged a travelling slide show around the country where
he displayed pictures of Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. "Satan
wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation,
and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army," he preached.
They "will only be defeated if we come against them in the
name of Jesus". It was the reporting of his remarks at a
revival meeting in Oregon that made them a subject of brief controversy.

There can be little doubt that he envisages the global war
on terror as a crusade. With the Geneva conventions apparently
suspended, international law is supplanted by biblical law. Boykin
is in God's chain of command. President Bush, he told an Oregon
congregation last June, is "a man who prays in the Oval
Office". And the president, too, is on a divine mission.
"George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters
in the US. He was appointed by God."

Boykin is not unique in his belief that Bush is God's anointed
against evildoers. Before his 2000 campaign, Bush confided to
a leader of the religious right: "I feel like God wants
me to run for president ... I sense my country is going to need
me. Something is going to happen."

Michael Gerson, Bush's chief speechwriter, tells colleagues
that on September 20 2001, after Bush delivered his speech to
the Congress declaring a war on terror, he called Gerson to thank
him for writing it. "God wants you here," Gerson says
he told the president. And he says that Bush replied: "God
wants us here."

But it's Bush who wants Rumsfeld, Cambone and Boykin here.

Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior advisor to President Clinton,
is Washington bureau chief of Salon.com